Let's be honest, we all make some pretty poor purchasing decisions from time to time. I remember saving for months - mowing lawns, pulling weeds, and babysitting spoiled brats that watched Tom and Jerry and ruined Lego creations - just to buy Scooby-Doo Mystery for the SNES. It was a poorly designed licensed game that controlled like garbage, had around three songs and four levels. I liked Scooby-Doo and was also eight, not exactly in the prime of my consumer decision making abilities.
Now imagine if all the purchases you made were bad decisions. Imagine seeing a deal on marked down video games, twenty dollars each say, and going ahead and buying five at a time. You will probably never play them, and you probably won't enjoy the ones you do. Sooner or later you can't even remember what a good game feels like. Everything you buy, all the games you play begin to oversaturate the thought-space you've set aside for video games until all your experiences become simple manipulation of the neurons in your brain. Can you imagine never getting that taste - that taste of bland, of average, of the poorly programmed and the poorly designed, of the lazy - out of your mouth? Can you imagine living in the boring haze of the cheap, picking the bones of the dying for every tiny achievement and every scant five minutes of enjoyment? Can you imagine being my friend, Sean?
You see, Sean's life is full of the poor purchasing decisions the rest of us have come to regret. I figure he just has no sense of regret, but the point is that Sean no longer has any concept of what a good video gam
e is, which is strange because he owns more video games that almost everyone I know. He just happens to be a frightening statistical anomaly in that nearly all of them are bad. So I was not expecting much when I stole a few games from him while staying at his apartment in Houston during Spring Break.
I was still disappointed.
Darksiders
"How's this... Darksiders?" I say, holding up the case so my friend Shawn can see. We're sitting in Sean's apartment (yes that gets confusing), on the floor, rifling through a pile of his games that we've shoved off a swiveling case next to his TV.
"Meh." Shawn replies. The sun is setting and we're all ready to leave, facing an hour and a half drive back to College Station to drop me off then a 12 hour drive to El Paso for everyone else. It's a weird twilight that's sort of dark but the pools of light burned into the rug eliminates the necessity for ceiling lights, so everything is darker than it should be. All my other friends - including Sean - stand around us and impatiently wait for us to finish our thievery.
"I like the sound of that. What's it about?"
"It's metal Zelda."
And so it was.
